Many years ago, in the early years of cable TV–this had to be no later than 1980–as a kid I watched a short movie on (I think) Showtime called Coast to Coast in Eighteen Minutes. It was a fascinating time-lapse film of someone making a drive from L.A. to New York, with images of the drive flickering in a mesmerizing fast-motion cascade. Yesterday I went looking for that film to see if it was preserved on YouTube; I was interested especially in what a coast-to-coast drive looked like more than 30 years ago.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find it, but I did find several other short films built around the same concept. Though it was made in 2014 and not the late 1970s, the one above is a pretty interesting and dramatic representation of just how big a country we live in. The driver and filmmaker, whose name is I believe Maurizio Sera, starts out under the Hollywood sign and winds up under the Capitol dome in Washington, D.C. And his film is only a third the length of the one I saw years ago! I thought I’d share it with you, so here it is, but if anyone has heard of Coast to Coast in Eighteen Minutes, let me know–put it in the comments.